Ripping Apart The Spanish Language & Obtaining Fluency

Some things are just plain tricky in Spanish. But once you learn the trick and practice it often, it tends to “stick”, just like learning a new word. Here’s are some examples of how we can use the the English adverb “just” in Spanish:

just — justo, sólo, solamente.

Note: Just so you know, sólo is an adverb meaning “only,” “solely” or “just”– the same as solamente. As a matter of fact, sólo and solamente can be used interchangeably. A speaker can decide which sounds better in any their sentence. On the contrary, solo without an accent mark is an adjective meaning “alone” or “on one’s own”.

I’m just sitting here. That’s all.
Sólo estoy sentado aquí. Es todo.

It’s located just down the street.
Está ubicado justo al final de la calle.

to just have done something/to have just finished doing something — acabar de hacer algo

In Spanish, we use the properly conjugated present tense form of acabar + de + the infinitive form of the verb (-ar, -er, -ir). This is expressed in English in the past tense. It may take some getting used to, but this phrasal formula is very useful in daily Spanish.

Beginning Thursday, June 1, 2017, my book Ripping Apart The Spanish Language: Ser & Estar will be free… for five days.

Grab yourself a copy. Share it with your buddies. Leave a review, or not. Either way, you can get it here:

You may be asking yourself this question. Like the rest of us, you may have seen a couple of books floating around out there that deal with the subject of Ser versus Estar. But I have not seen many books that explain Ser and Estar in sufficient detail, that squash all doubts about their usage, and instill such a sense of confidence in the reader that by the time they complete the book he or she can proudly say, “Hey, I really get it now!”

Therefore, it is my mission to change this.

It has been my purpose to write a book that gives you exactly what you need and ends the quest for that missing information in your Spanish learning journey.

This book will take you through many uses of Ser and Estar individually, explaining just how it works, using lots of examples and providing lots of exercises to “make it stick”.

By the end of this book, I am confident that you will have mastered the usages of Ser and Estar and will be ready to go out and speak like you know what you’re doing.

Uses of Ser

Some of the uses of Ser that we’ll be covering in this section
are as follows:

There are all kinds of language learners in the world. The kinds that “speak from day one”. The ones that study in schools for two or three years, then take a trip to Latin America or Spain and see if they can remember how to order some paella. There are those that become introverted (if they weren’t that way already) and study for hours per day until they get a substantial amount of vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation practice under their belt to hold a decent conversation, before going out and trying out their skills with real people, whether in person or on Skype.

Regardless of what kind of student you may be, there is one thing that all of us will go through, and that’s trying to get over the mountain of beginner status and flipping over the top into intermediate status and ultimately, advanced status. The famed light at the end of the tunnel, except there is no end to this tunnel, because language learning never really ends, does it?

If you are someone that is studying Spanish, for example, there are certain things that you can do to get over the beginner hump. And that is to learn some real-life Spanish phrases, slang and idiomatic expressions to accomplish your goal.

So, you wanna sound like a native? Then learn the way natives speak, and speak like them.

Below are a few examples of what I am talking about. These (and about 2,000 other phrases) will be included in my current book project: “2,001 REAL SPANISH PHRASES”. Title subject to change. This is a very young (but very fun) project. 🙂

What happens when the chosen ones, having survived a crash landing and now suffering the after-effects of the injections administered by the astrophysicists back home, take on a journey through the untraveled, dusty, rocky terrain of Kepler, en route to the oasis that was promised to them?

For Tess Hadfield, a fist-clenching, tomboy from New York, and Gunner McAuliffe, a jokester ex-military school student from Glass Wire Point, New California, this is just the beginning.

Like this:

IF I USE YOUR IDEA FOR MY NEXT BOOK, I’LL GIVE YOU A FREE COPY OF THE EBOOK AND I’LL SEND YOU A PAPERBACK COPY AS WELL, FREE. (AND I’LL THROW IN A COPY OF MY LAST BOOK, ON SER & ESTAR.)

There are myriads of books out there on Spanish learning. Too many. But as we browse through the rows and rows of these books at Barnes & Noble, as we peruse through pages and pages on Amazon.com, we don’t always find what we’re looking for. What is it, exactly, that you would love to see in a Spanish learning book. What would really help you out?

For example, would you like to see a book on reflexive verbs, pronoun usage, slang words and phrases, difference in language between Spain and Mexico, how phrasal verbs translate into Spanish, Spanish dialogue, etc.?

Would you want a book that is written to teach you a specific problem area of yours?

I’d like to get your input for my next project. My goal has been to help other people learn this beautiful language!

After having such a great experience with the book about the Spanish subjunctive and it’s usages, I figured that their other books were just as good. So, I bought another one of their books – one called “Pocket Por and Para“. Wowzy. What a great book as well. Of course, I just had to write a review of this one too, which can be found by clicking right here.

So far, I was very satisfied with these books from Gordon and Cynthia. I’ll tell you what! Whether you are a fairly new learner of Spanish, or someone who has studied Spanish for years (like me), these books are great. The explanations are amazingly simple to understand and the example sentences and exercises make it even easier to just “get it” and “make it stick”!

Going through these books and doing EVERY exercise was a tremendously good refresher for me, and would be for anyone else.

So why haven’t I written a review yet for “Perfecting The Past In Spanish”? Simply, it’s because I have been so busy writing my own books that I just haven’t gotten around to it yet. But I think pretty soon I’ll be taking a little break from writing and write something up. You betcha.

I realize that I am praising the books very highly, but I mean every word that I said, er… wrote. And you will see (and believe) exactly what I mean if you get these books. If you’re serious about Spanish, get them. You won’t regret it.

Please know that I am NOT getting any kick-backs from writing about the Smith-Durán’s books, nor did they ask me to write reviews. I just know and appreciate hard work when I see it. And their work, so far, has been worth my time. That, I can tell you.

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❝Learn everything you can, anytime you can, from anyone you can; there will always come a time when you will be grateful you did.❞
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